


No One Lights a Candle to Remember

by Myzic



Series: Whumptober 2020 [10]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Angst, Gen, Graphic Description, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Juno isn't sad that Sarah's dead, Minor Character Death, Not Beta Read, Suicidal Ideation, We die like..., Whump, Whumptober 2020, but he is sad that he isn't, it's sarah steel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:28:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27130460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Myzic/pseuds/Myzic
Summary: My condolences, they had hesitated on the other end of the phone with the tone of someone who knew what Sarah had done to get the jail time, and wasn’t sure how to break the news. My best wishes to you, Mr. Steel, and a beep at the end of the call.Sarah Steel was dead. Juno didn’t know how, not the gritty details of it at least, but she was dead. Suicide. After years of declining mental health, she’d finally given in.It was just misfortune that her story ended one year too late.
Series: Whumptober 2020 [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1956226
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	No One Lights a Candle to Remember

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger Warnings: graphic depiction of violence, suicidal ideation, mentions of suicide, grief, heavy consumption of alcohol, bad coping mechanisms.
> 
> Look after yourself.

Juno put his phone down on the wooden desk,  _ his _ wooden desk on top of all the paperwork still piled on top of it. 

_ My condolences _ , they had hesitated on the other end of the phone with the tone of someone who knew what Sarah had done to get the jail time, and wasn’t sure how to break the news.  _ My best wishes to you, Mr. Steel, _ and a beep at the end of the call.

Sarah Steel was dead. He didn’t know how, not the gritty details of it at least, but she was dead. Suicide. After years of declining mental health, she’d finally given in.

It was just misfortune that her story ended one year too late.

The anniversary of Be— It had been a little over a year since he’d been back to their apartment, and not long after since he’d seen Ma’s face across from him in court.

Shouldn’t he be happy? Sarah didn’t get to live a long life, didn’t get to grow old or happy or any of that bullshit when… with what she’d done. She would never get to live out all the years  _ he _ didn’t.

Juno curled his hands into fists, gritting his teeth the way he did when she snarled at him, tried to feel the liquid magma running through his veins, wishing that he could burn her with it.

There was nothing there. Just the sounds of mild curses from other officer’s desks, the scratching of pen on paper, muffled yells from the holding cells.

“Hey, Steel, Steel! The hell, man?” A round-cheeked man waved at him from the desk across from Juno’s, reaching over the side of his desk to tap on his own with a pen that left small black checks on his paperwork. “Something wrong?”

“No, nothing. Just a call from… a friend.” He swiped away the paperwork before it was completely ruined by Puck’s attempts on his attention. “What do you want from me?”

“A nice long talk about how you’re feeeeeling today, Steel,” Officer Falco had a laugh like a junker, jumpy and unsettling, “Higher-ups gave us a ‘go’ on the plan for the Hildebrand case. Just got the memo, so we’re blowing this joint.”

He eyed the papers still on his desk, “When?” Puck gestured at him to get up off of his chair. “You’re kidding me, now? We’re not gonna prepare, or make a backup or something?”

“Memory serves me right, Steel, you’re the junior officer here. You got what, a year’s experience under your belt, and think you know when to call the shots?” Puck shrugged on his navy jacket, and Juno started to do the same with his, pulling it off the back of his chair. “‘Sides, little old lady gets a hit on her, don’t you think we should be there soon as possible? Have a heart, Steel. Gotta keep the senior population alive, the elderly are our future!” He tacked on, like an afterthought, “And our paycheck.”

“Yeah, sure, and you’re such an altruist, Falco. Such a goddamn altruist, the idea you came up with involves using said paycheck as bait,” Juno snapped, unable to help the bite in his words. Falco didn’t know what he was talking about, but the teasing tone when he mentioned Juno not caring about this lady’s death… It was just shitty timing.

“Keep talking and your ass is grass. Gonna be a dangerous time out there, officer,” He jabbed a finger at Juno’s chest, and he was already pushing himself backward on his swivel chair, but Falco thrust his thumb towards himself, “You’re gonna want to keep to my good side.”

Juno got up from his desk with a tired huff and followed Officer Falco out the front door towards the parking lot. This might shock him into feeling better after this, less weird. And by less weird, he meant less of… nothing. But apathy was nothing compared to the rush of knocking someone’s lights out, so at least he had that in store for him.

~

“Shitshitshitshitshit, Goddamit, Falco!” Juno swore as his feet slapped on the pavement outside Hildebrand’s house. The would-be murderer was dashing through the alley with him, having caught on to their rattrap as Falco jumped the gun, alerting their  _ would-be criminal _ .

He was gaining ground quickly and unholstered his blaster to take a shot, directing the muzzle between her straining shoulder blades as her arms pumped sharply. Except, the assassin had apparently taken note of the distance closing swiftly between them, and she turned, knives glinting.

They swung downwards as she danced forward, all lithe movement, and he brought in his blaster close to his chest to narrowly avoid a very painful, non-medical amputation of his hands. The ensuing blow jolted up his bones and Juno dropped his blaster with a hiss while it clanged on the concrete beneath them.

She was fluid in her movement, blades winking in the sunlight and darting towards him. The look written across her face might have been desperation, but something about the heavy slope of her eyebrows, the snarling curl of her lip made it seem more like rage.

Maybe it was because Sarah Steel was still fresh in his mind. Maybe it was because he hadn’t been able to shake the thought of her since he got that call, but with the curled hair escaping the woman’s bun messily and the look of sheer anger twisting her features— Juno saw the deep resentment of a familiar face for just a second— and flinched.

He wasn’t given long to correct his mistake, because he felt the cold metal of a blade thrust into his side. “Mother _ fucker _ ,” Juno’s voice stretched an octave and he could just make out her face, eyebrows shooting upward in an expression of comical surprise.

So he did something stupid while he still could.

His hand pulled her left arm forward, using the momentum of her stabbing motion (a very  _ effective _ stab he knew), and threw her to the floor, a muffled scream escaping his clenched teeth as the motion drove the blade in her right hand a little further into his side. Juno tossed the spare knife from her left hand to the side and pressed her to the alley floor. On a normal day, with a regular criminal, he might feel a little bad about forcing them to eat dirt in an alley, which he knew from experience was about the filthiest surface in Hyperion. 

But there was a very long, very sharp knife sticking out of his left side right then, so he excused himself for feeling  _ less than charitable  _ right now. 

Juno kept his teeth grit, and knocked her out with a decisive blow to the side of her head, and ignored the feeling of his shirt, the fibers clinging to his skin as it grew uncomfortably sticky and damp.

God, it would probably make her happy he’d been stabbed the same day she died. Ma would’ve looked smug, face twisting into a satisfied grin that always made his chest revolt. That, or she would’ve been righteously biting.  _ What did I tell you? I said you were setting yourself up to be as rotten as the rest of this city and did you listen? Yeah, I  _ know _ what you thought. You thought you were gonna go out there and change the world, didn’t you? Look at yourself. What makes you think you can fix anything? _

The whispering echo of her voice crooned, softly acerbic into his ear, and Juno shivered because, for a second, her words rang of nothing but the truth. That was the thing about storytellers. Their words settled in your bones in a way that was difficult to shake off. But Sarah Steel’s wisdom didn’t extend to advice on puncture wounds, so he ignored her low cadence still lingering in his mind. 

What were you supposed to do when you got stabbed, again? The details escaped him, but Juno shuddered at the sight of bright steel sticking out his side, the metal reaching past his vision and into his side, and he yanked it out in a jerk.

  
  
  


During the hottest months of the year, Hyperion City blazed inside the dome, but it was the desert that took the brunt of the heat. And those few times it poured acid from the sky at the peak of the summer, unrelenting and corrosive onto the searing sand— The desert outside their bubble of safely would glow a fluorescent red, searing and burning and melting amidst all the sand that couldn’t escape its own mass. 

It was beautiful, and it was deadly, so it suited Hyperion. It was also very tantalizing as a kid, watching the amber glow of molten glass flare alluringly against buildings too close to the edge of their sky. 

Well, six-year-old Juno didn’t have to wonder anymore, because twenty-year-old Juno was pretty certain he was feeling a rough approximation of what it might be like to touch the Eos Plains. But with his gut instead of his tongue.

He pressed a hand to his side, where a stream of blood ran down to his hip and the quickly dampening denim of his pants chafed. Maybe he was supposed to have left the damn thing in after all. 

Instead of keeping his eyes on the stab wound in his side, he turned them to the limp girl, deadweight on the ground. “Falco!” he yelled down the alley he’d come through, hoping his partner might be around the corner, following him during the chase. “Falco, I’m over here! Got the girl, c’mon,” The  _ one _ time he wasn’t on Juno’s ass, and it had to be when he’d gotten shish kebab’d. 

He bent down, intent on dragging her by the arms to the police car if he had to, and his intestines protested violently, vehemently. An involuntary groan escaped his mouth even as he forced himself to put more pressure on his side

“ _ Shit _ .”

~

The lack of furniture and general decoration in his apartment wasn’t pathetic if you looked at the few individual items that were there. Such as the bottle of whiskey, resting on his thigh, caramel liquid swishing murky through the green glass of the bottle. The couch wasn’t much to look at and the alcohol wasn’t much to drink, room-temperature fluid sitting unpleasantly on his tongue. The fridge had probably broken down again, leftovers and milk spoiled. That was a less drunk Juno’s problem though.

He forgot to keep his breaths shallow and inhaled a little too deeply, pain spiking through his side. Juno groaned, in annoyance this time as he readjusted his position, sitting up and leaning down on the cushions to find a comfortable spot for housing his wound. His plan, which consisted of the words ‘get drunk’ kept flopping, which was unfair, because on a day like today he deserved a little forgetfulness, didn’t he?

Except, when Juno tried to drink himself into oblivion, he forgot to keep his breathing light and aggravated his side, which sobered him up, and then he drank more to dull the pain until he breathed too hard again which resulted in a miserable loop that ended in him wincing in pain approximately every five minutes.

But the thing about drinking to forget was that it only worked if you had a distraction. Which he did not, alone in his apartment with nothing but the rest of his bottle and the mass of thoughts bearing down on him from above, thundering and shifting all shades of… grief? Sadness? Guilt? Regret? All those things you were supposed to feel, expected to feel when a loved one died.

Well, you know what? Juno did feel something. Satisfaction. 

He was glad she’d died now, only a little over a year since she— since— The unforgivable. He was almost glad she died now, so soon, so close that he could still feel the howling thing that scraped inside him every single goddamn day. When it was still fresh, instead of a decade from now, when the anger had faded, become tempered by time. 

(There was a part of him that can’t imagine ever not feeling the tar, wretched and boiling at the bottom of his stomach, and it is this part of him that knows, a year, a decade, a lifetime from now, this anger will always be there.)

The rest of his bottle goes down easily, the liquid gasoline sliding effortlessly down his throat as it became more accustomed to the burning sparks stinging against sensitive skin. The ache of his wound slips away as Juno’s thoughts wobble and glide to the forefront of his mind, cruel with the added boost of his drunken mind fueling them.

There was discontent in his chest. Not at the way he left things between him and Sarah, but at the fact that she escaped. She got away from decades of grief and guilt, every year of which she would’ve deserved. She should have been left to stew in it— the wrong son, she’d gotten the  _ wrong son _ , and no one regretted her mistake more than him— for the rest of her life. Oblivion was the only punishment she had to face now, and with the things she’d done in her life, that was more of a blessing than anything. 

He put the rim of his bottle against his forehead, feeling the polished rim of glass press bluntly to the oily skin. His anger simmered along with a mess of other emotions he couldn’t tell apart as they melted into each other, a teeming ball of undirected wrath and melancholy and loss pushing him further into the cushions, like gravity itself was pressing in on him from every direction.

Either way, she was gone, and so was Be—

But Juno was still there. He was still here, and she was dead. Sarah Steel had died and no one mourned her passing, not even him. It was a death that suited her, he thought. The world did not blink at the loss of one of its number, and nothing had changed. Not even him. 

(Liar.)

Juno smacked down the empty bottle on the table beside his couch, ignoring the way it rocked on uneven legs while the other, full bottle teetered dangerously before he wrapped his palm around its neck. 

And there was still this burning, insistent in his fingers. Chagrin and discontent, sour against the back of his teeth. Juno still had this brimming resentment, around which his inebriated mind orbited. Disappointment.

He’d never intended on being the last Steel left standing.

**Author's Note:**

> The first time I listened, I thought the script implied Sarah committed suicide, so that's what I wrote here.
> 
> Also, I cannot picture Puck as anyone but that one fairy fuck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Agent of sheer chaos, that guy was a dick and I think that might’ve come through on my take with this Puck?
> 
> Come find me @themagicmistress on Tumblr!


End file.
